R.A.B.B.i.T. PASSES SUBMISSION AGAIN

Well, we finally made it - Early this morning R.A.B.B.i.T. finally made it through Apple submission. Woot!

Right now we're in the process of sending out some promo codes to a various press sites, just to give them a couple of days head start before we release the game properly, but we've settled on 11AM (UTC) on Thursday the 24th of March as our release date/time.

But what exactly took so long?

BLOODY SCREENSHOTS

For our regular followers, you'll remember that R.A.B.B.i.T. actually passed submission the first time, without a single issue? Then we decided to re-submit the game to fix a couple of problems? But a bug appeared that failed that particular submission, which we were sure had been present the entire time?

Well, this time, we know for sure that this new submission failing issue was present all along: It failed because the screenshots contain blood in them. Screenshots which we put onto the store page FOUR months ago! And -- although we have a age rating for the app that allows for blood -- the screenshots apparently aren't allowed to contain blood in them because anyone can browse the app store.

For whatever reason, Apple didn't catch this the first time around... Or the second!

Removing the blood and putting it back through submission cost us another week. And, of course, nothing that we've seen anywhere has ever mentioned this caveat until now!

DEFENDY ROCKET BLASTS INTO SUBMISSION

While we've been sitting here twiddling our thumbs and putting R.A.B.B.i.T. back into submission every now and again, we've been putting the last couple of touches onto Defendy Rocket. We've been going back-and-forth with the game whenever there was nothing else to do and, amongst other things we:

Finally have the video ads working.

Have translated the entire game into multiple languages.

Re-worked the loading/signing in process to match R.A.B.B.i.T.'s (including reworking the main menu to support a new 'Online' sub-screen).

Implemented the last few cosmetic items.

Late last week we finally resolved the last minor issue, generated a build and uploaded a binary. Normally these take about 30 minutes to go through 'processing' before you can place the build into submission, but for some reason this build took much longer. In fact it took two days before failing for an 'unknown reason'.

So we bumped up the version number, rebuilt the entire project from scratch, uploaded another binary and began waiting for it to go through processing. But, weirdly, the act of uploading a new one caused the original one to magically fix the unknown error! We shrugged, rolled our eyes and put the originally binary straight into submission.

We still don't have a concrete plan for Defendy Rocket yet. We'll probably release it shortly after R.A.B.B.i.T., depending on how well R.A.B.B.i.T. trends on the app store.

EPIC AND THE ANDROID ISSUES

It's now been three weeks since Epic (finally) replicated our fatal class A crash on Android. Because Epic NEVER bother to give you any feedback about the issues you're chasing and because you can't access their bug database to find out the status of the bug yourself, the following week I poked them for an update: Nothing!

I asked again the following week: Nothing, again. However this time we got told not to expect a fix any time soon because "Epic's priorities are different this time of year".

It seems Epic are way more interested in trying to appeal to new customers than keeping their existing ones happy. The fact that it took them three months to find a bug that we had a 100% reproduction case for was insulting enough (we even offered to send them our device in the end), but then to get told that nobody had even looked at the bug after two weeks is really something.

We when started TriCat 10 months ago, I would have recommended Unreal to any indie developer out there. Now, however, I'd tell them to stay well and truly clear. If anything, we think our biggest regret with TriCat is not just taking the hit at the start and learning Unity - Sure, it would have taken a month or two to get up to speed, but we'd have probably released both games months ago (and maybe even have finished a third by now). Not to mention, we'd have Windows Phone support too.